Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 18, 1907.djvu/188

156 usually gone into, but this does not appear to have been essential.

We need not linger over these tales. All that is essential to us is to recognise that over them hangs no depressing rule of "Dark Divinities," no gloom of spirit-haunted shades, no thought of death or pain. They are painted with all the powers of brilliant word-painting of which the Irish Gael was such a master, as worlds of joy and of youth, of vital and unending life. They are, in fact, the Paradise of the Gods of Life. It is earth that is in them represented always as "the dark unquiet land," the place where "amid the assemblies of short-lived mortals" man is fated to await his death.

This is the essential distinction of the Pagan dreams. But when we pass to the visions influenced by Christian thought, we are conscious at once of a change of tone. Gradually the joyousness that has been the dominant note of Pagan belief is tuned down into a minor key, the old stories receive into themselves new features, counterbalancing what had hitherto been wholly bright and hopeful, by suggestions of gloom, of suffering, and of despair. At first these suggestions are fitted awkwardly into the old framework, they are rare, and, as it were, out of place; but gradually, as larger portions of the new belief find their way into the old romances, many of the older features become modified, and we finally emerge into an atmosphere wholly controlled by mediaeval beliefs introduced through Christian influence. The meeting-point of Pagan and Christian thought is always of deep interest; but I know of no place in custom or literature where there can be traced, step by step, the